10

The taxi dropped her outside a gloomy, high-roofed shed. ‘Liverpool’, it said in huge, red letters. Through the open doors, across the oil-stained concrete floor, rose the side of the berthed vessel, a dark cliff face pierced by a small entrance, around which passengers and stewards, porters and delivery men came and went, dwarfed by the scale of the ship and the departure shed.

She smiled at the taxi driver as she counted out shillings and sixpences. He’d been so friendly, said the sunshine was great and what a pity we didn’t get more of it and asked if she’d seen Island in the Sun when it was at the Astoria. That’s what he’d like, a nice tropical island. Harry Belafonte he could take or leave.

‘Here y’are, miss,’ he said, swinging her case off the luggage platform as if it were a handbag. ‘See ye enjoy yer holiday. Ah hope ye get good weather.’

‘Thank you very much. I enjoyed the ride down,’ she said warmly, as she picked up her case and turned away.

No need to tell him she was not going on holiday. No need to say she might never come back. She walked slowly. Her suitcase was not very heavy, but she found carrying a case awkward. It made her feel clumsy and her back always ached after only a short distance.

Halfway across the shed, she put it down. For a moment she stood watching the birds which came and went in the dimness high above her head. Then she changed hands and went on, thinking of Ronnie, his tall figure striding across this same empty space, all by himself, just as she was. He’d said he didn’t want any fond farewells and neither did she.

The gangplank was ridged and too springy for comfort; the bright lights of the reception area dazzled her. She was grateful when a steward took her case and led her down narrow, airless corridors to her tiny, single cabin.

She shut the door, dumped her travel bag on her bunk and dropped down beside it. Harry had been right. He’d insisted she book a cabin. Last time she’d travelled, two summers ago, she’d shared the lower decks with fellow students, sleeping on a shiny green couch beneath a single grey blanket. She hadn’t got much sleep. In the morning, she’d had to queue up to wash in a hand basin jammed into the small space which led to the only lavatory. She still remembered how fiercely hot the water was.

The evening air was warm, with only the slightest breeze coming off the calm water when she made her way back up on deck and stood leaning on the rail, looking back to the heart of the city, only a stone’s throw away. Across the channel, in the shipyards, the skeleton of a new passenger liner dominated the working vessels that unloaded coal or great wooden containers, swung up and out of their deep, dark holds in great rope meshes by tall cranes that looked like huge yellow birds.

Below her, there was a sudden outbreak of noise as a party of school children appeared, shepherded by two teachers. They chattered excitedly, asked questions, tripped awkwardly, as they manoeuvred their luggage on the vibrating gangplank before disappearing into the bowels of the ship.

She smiled, feeling suddenly very distant from the schoolgirl she had once been. Was it simply the passage of the years, or was it the experiences they’d brought her that made the life she’d once had in the house by the forge seem so very far away?

Ronnie would most certainly have stood here, where he could take in everything that was going on. He’d have noted the ships and their cargoes, watched the men who worked the pulleys and wires, calling to each other in sharp, undecipherable code. Being Ronnie, he’d have been thinking about rates of pay and working conditions, all the social and economic concerns that were now the basis of his work.

She could see his dark eyes and the gaunt lines of his face. Suddenly, she was back in the room in Elmwood Avenue when it was still his. He was singing to her. ‘Fair thee well my own dear love, Fare thee well a while …’

She’d always thought ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’ one of the most moving of the emigrant songs. She’d heard it a hundred times, for it was a favourite with Jamsey when he came to play the gramophone in the big kitchen, but never before had it reduced her to tears.

Tonight, the song conjured up for her the pain of all those women who had ever stood weeping on a quay, knowing their men must leave, whether to find work, or to escape from eviction, or poverty, imprisonment or the gallows. Not knowing if they would ever come back, or even survive the journey and the harsh conditions at the end of it, make good and send passage money, or turn their back on the past and forget them. The enormity of their loss overwhelmed her.

She was completely taken aback by her feelings. It was not that she hadn’t known. With a teacher like Charlie Running, a man so angered by the injustices he saw all around him that he joined the IRA and risked his life in the 1920s, how could she fail to know? But knowing about something was not the same thing as standing on the deck of a ship yourself, saying goodbye to all that was familiar and not knowing what fate the future had in store for you.

She blew her nose and wiped her eyes surreptitiously as some other passengers came and leaned on the rail nearby. She’d written to Ronnie and told him what she planned to do. But he couldn’t write back. She had no address to give him. For the first time in the six years since he left, she was out of touch, beyond the encouragement and sharp comment he’d always offered her.

Even without looking at her watch, she recognised the urgent activity below her on the quayside meant departure was imminent. The last ropes and hawsers were cast off. When she had lain awake in the last week, in the few dark hours of the short night, she’d thought often of what it would feel like to be cast adrift, launched into one’s own life without sheltering arms, without someone to share the problems and celebrate the successes. Now she was about to find out.

To her surprise, she felt nothing at all. Indeed, nothing seemed any different. The view across the channel did not change, the towering bulk of the departure sheds did not diminish. Not to begin with. Then she noticed texturing appear in the still, grey water, a deeper note of the engine. And then, quite suddenly, a space appeared, a distinct gap, no longer bridged by rope or gangway, cutting off those who stood waving still on the quay from those who’d already begun their journey.

She waved a farewell herself, a kind of courtesy to the city that had been her home for the last four years, crossed the vibrating deck and stood watching the channel broaden and the low hills of the Down shore rise, smooth and green, into the paling evening sky.

Over there, hidden by some nearer ripple of the landscape, stood Scrabo Tower. She could still call to mind the pattern of little fields, green with summer growth, or iced with frost and the remnants of snow. A special place. One that had played its part in her life and in her first love. What did one do with such memories? Treasure them like letters tied with pink ribbon, moments of joy too precious to lose? Or put them away in the attic of the mind, like broken objects to be disposed of when next you had time and opportunity?

She had no answers to her questions, so she walked around the deck, studied the features of the darker Antrim shore, looked back at the wake streaming from the stern and up at the escort of gulls still following the ship. Suddenly tired, she sat down and watched the low, green hills grow misty in the light of the low sun. In what seemed no time at all, the land was gone, the ship setting course southwards for the calmest of night crossings.

 

The long, winding train reduced speed, clattered and rattled, as it moved crabwise across broad acres of track. The occupants of the crowded carriage stirred minutely. At first, no more than a movement of hands, a twist of the body, a slight inclination of the head. Then, as the juddering vibrations eased, some of the more daring folded their newspapers, rose to their feet and took cases from the overhead racks.

By the window, Clare sat motionless, her eyes still focused on the yellowing evening sky, her paperback unopened on her knee, her mind absorbed with the procession of images the last two days had left with her. Now her destination was so close, she felt reluctant to arrive; the same reluctance she’d often felt, waking in her room and wondering how the reality of the morning would fit with the images of her dreams.

The carriage was full of moving bodies now, the sunlight shut off as dark, sooty cliffs embraced the barely moving train. The brakes squealed, doors opened, her travelling companions departed as if escaping from some dreadful contagion, leaving her alone with the debris strewn around the empty carriage. Slowly, she retrieved her suitcase and travel bag from the rack, shook out the crumpled fabric of her cotton dress and stepped cautiously down on to the platform.

As she was swept into the flow of moving passengers, she picked up the acrid twang of a familiar smell. As richly evocative as the perfume of turf on the metal circle in front of the forge, it touched a memory of pleasure and excitement, of the time three years earlier when she had made her very first expedition abroad.

‘Gauloise,’ she said, out loud. ‘Gauloise.’

‘Gare du Nord, Gare du Nord,’ a voice bellowed in her ear.

She laughed aloud, suddenly overjoyed. With that smell and this bustle, where else in the world could she be but the Gare du Nord?

 

The low light was straight in her eyes as she came out of the station and paused, deciding what to do next. It wasn’t that she hadn’t made a plan. She had. But at this moment she was so excited she couldn’t manage anything as sensible as her plan. As if to convince herself she was really back in Paris, she needed to drink a coffee, or buy a newspaper. Just speaking a few words of French to someone might do.

‘Taxi, mademoiselle. I make a special rate for you, however far you want to go.’

She smiled at the blue-clad figure, amused at the thought of taking a taxi all the way to the Bois de Boulogne.

‘Non, merci, monsieur. I have to phone my friend. Sorry.’

The taxi driver shrugged his shoulders with a gesture she had never seen anywhere except in France. It reminded her immediately of Andrew, who imitated it so perfectly. She found a phone box and concentrated on dialling Marie-Claude’s number.

‘Clare, chérie, how wonderful. You’ve arrived. I’ll come and collect you right away. Go and have a coffee while you wait. I’ll pick you up at the taxi rank. The drivers know me now. They think I am mad, but harmless.’

Clare heard the warm, familiar voice and felt the same delight as when the guard had bellowed ‘Gare du Nord’ in her ear.

‘No, Marie-Claude, you mustn’t,’ she said firmly. ‘The traffic looks as bad as ever. I’ll come on the Metro. It’s a lovely evening and my case isn’t heavy. Besides, I need to smell Paris and see some trees. Are you really sure I can stay for a night or two?’

‘But, of course, you can stay as long as you like. Gerard is away at a conference. The children are visiting his mother in Provence. Your coming will save me from taking a lover out of sheer boredom. I’ll go and find a bottle of wine and make us a little supper. Come quickly, Clare. I can’t wait to see you.’

Clare laughed. How strange that after all the time they had spent together in Deauville and Paris, she could forget that this beautiful, sophisticated Frenchwoman could say things with just the same uninhibited directness as Jessie.

‘I’m on my way,’ she said. ‘Fast as Superman.’

‘Fast as Superman, it is. I’ll be watching for you,’ Marie-Claude said, laughing, as she rang off.

The first summer Clare had gone to Deauville with the St Clairs, Philippe had been going through a Superman phase. In the end, the whole family, even Marie-Claude’s very elderly grandmother, had ended up saying ‘Fast as Superman’. Philippe was now in his second year at lycée. According to Marie-Claude, whenever Superman was mentioned now, he merely smiled in a rather superior and distant manner.

Still smiling, Clare picked up her case and walked across to one of the flower seller’s stands. She ran her eyes over the huge buckets full of blooms. Beside her, a young man was handing over a whole fistful of notes for a sheaf of red roses. She eyed them and cautiously located the bucket from which they’d come. She drew a sharp breath, shocked by the price, amazed that an ordinary-looking young man could afford such luxury.

‘Mademoiselle, I cannot understand why you come to buy flowers,’ said the flower seller, a small, brown-skinned man in a flat cap that made him seem even smaller than he was. ‘Surely your apartment is filled with flowers from your admirers.’ He waved his hands in flowing motions to create the mounds of flowers, large and small, which must surround her.

She beamed at him. ‘Naturally, monsieur. Though none of them as beautiful as yours,’ she replied. ‘But I have a friend I’m going to visit.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then we must find something suitable for your friend. The roses you liked, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, they’re quite lovely, but too expensive, I’m afraid,’ she said, glancing over the summer bouquets, thinking of Marie-Claude’s elegant sitting room with its Louis Quinze furniture and her collection of porcelain and china.

‘But, of course, the red roses are expensive,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘So, young men must pay for their passion. But see, mademoiselle, the yellow roses, they too are lovely.’ He drew out a long-stemmed bouquet to hold before her. ‘These do not carry the premium of passion,’ he confided in a whisper.

Clare admitted that they were indeed lovely. As she studied the golden blooms, only just beginning to unfurl, she remembered the pair of slim Sèvres jars that stood at either end of the marble mantelpiece.

‘I’m afraid I can only afford two of these,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Perhaps you won’t want to sell them singly.’

‘Perhaps not, to most,’ he agreed. ‘But for you, mam’selle, it is a different matter,’ he said, selecting carefully from the bouquet he had displayed. He wrapped the blooms in cellophane and tied a piece of ribbon round the stems before handing them to her.

‘Thank you so much. I’m so grateful for your help,’ she said, as she handed over the first of her franc notes.

‘A pleasure, mam’selle. A great pleasure,’ he said with a bow, as she put her travel bag on her shoulder, settled the roses carefully in her free hand and gave him a parting smile.

Even the Metro seemed full of delights as she hurried along the familiar corridors. She listened for the clatter of doors that told her there was no point hurrying, or the rush of air that suggested she might just catch the train about to emerge from the darkness. She ran her eyes over the posters, reading off their messages, restoring them to memory, as delighted to be reminded of her favourite brand of coffee as to see what ballet was being performed at Châtelet.

She had forgotten how the corridors sparkled with minute specks of some light-refracting mineral in the matrix of their dark surfaces. The first time she’d negotiated them, she’d thought of the forge and the tiny bright scraps of metal filings that lay in the soft piles of dark dust. Now these tiny points of light were themselves the jewels of the Paris underground, part of her own experience, part of present and future, no longer tied to the past.

The journey out of Paris was slow, but pleasant, the trains uncrowded as the evening moved on. Much of it was not underground at all. She looked out over parks and gardens, breathed the warm, summer air, rich with the scent of cooking. The smell of roast lamb made her mouth water and she realised she was hungry. But the emptiness of her stomach seemed nothing compared to the hunger of her eyes. It seemed to her she’d been living in a world of black and white for a very long time now. Avidly, she sought out light and movement and colour, shops with trays of fruit and vegetables arranged in contrasting patterns, striped awnings, a woman in a red dress, children kicking a yellow striped beach ball beneath the trees, umbrellas outside a terrace café, a gendarme, perspiring in the warm evening air, wiping his face with a spotted handkerchief.

‘Oh, ma petite, how tired you must be,’ cried Marie-Claude as she opened the door and stretched out her arms.

She had watched the small figure walk up the driveway and stand looking around at the well-kept gardens which lay beyond the entrance to the apartments. Such a solitary little figure, with a suitcase and a bag, carrying two yellow roses tied with ribbon. How like her, how very like her. Even when she came the very first time, an unknown student, she had brought them each a little gift.

‘Come, chérie, tell me how we can best restore you. Shower or aperitif? Rest or food?’

Clare followed her up the wide marble stairs to the thickly carpeted landing, from which the main rooms of the apartment opened.

‘What I should like most of all is to sit by the window looking over the gardens while you tell me about Michelle and Philippe and Gerard,’ she began, aware that a picture had been forming in her mind as her arrival drew nearer. ‘But perhaps I do need a shower,’ she added, laughing. ‘It seems a long time since London this morning, and even then, there was no hot water!’

She could see the concern in Marie-Claude’s eyes and knew that the weariness of the journey was showing clearly in her face. She would have to tell Marie-Claude what had happened. But not tonight. There would be time enough. Tonight was a gift, a homecoming she had not expected.